A home-made tuteur from scraps

Had some fun yesterday making a tutuer for a clematis I transplanted to my front foundation.  I had some really nice mulberry branches that were begging to be used and not tossed in the burn pile.  I tied the branches together with some bits of copper wire left over from our basement remodel and wrapped a grapevine around. Fresh grapevine is so pliable and easy to use.  Dried grapevine needs a soaking before you can bend it into a circle.

The bees and butterflies approve of my allium addiction

Oh, and there's so many butterflies!  I saw whites, monarchs, swallowtails, admirals, an angle-wing, a dark-winged butterfly I haven't seen before, and a hackberry butterfly.  I wonder if this butterfly party is courtesy of home gardeners and their penchant for lots of different plants?

All my columbines are in bloom now

Those were the only good gardening events yesterday.  The rest of my day sucked.  I found out that I have a massive common asparagus beetle infestation on my asparagus.  Every spear is just loaded with eggs!  Now I'll have to spend my afternoons squashing the adults and larvae.   

I also found out that there's some patches of poison ivy in my woods.  Normally I avoid herbicides and pesticides but not for poison ivy.  It's getting the brush killer treatment!  Luckily, I was able to rinse off in cold water right away so the oil wouldn't seep into my skin.  Thank heavens for that!

Finally, I found out something shocking.  There's a big patch of bishop's weed  that I've was planning on pulling out in the future but wasn't in a hurry to do so.  Everything changed yesterday--while working in my asparagus patch I noticed a bunch of seedlings I didn't recognize...hundreds, maybe thousands of little sprouts, every inch of open ground was covered.  I took a closer look and realized they are bishop's weed.  It self-sows!  I had no idea that stuff could set viable seed; I thought it was listed as invasive because it's such an aggressive groundcover.   

Not sure how long this tuteur
will last but it was fun to make!

Well, you can imagine that my plan for the day was immediately revised.   The mature plants are just starting to flower so I had to do something quick.  I've had some success with digging out the roots but this time I'm going to try smothering the patch with black plastic film first.  I've heard that smothering doesn't work but this patch is on a super steep slope and the plants are so tall it's hard to tell where the ground is. I don't need to plant this bed anytime soon so I can wait out those little monsters and once the foliage withers, I can dig out the roots easily.  (At least that's how I'm hoping it's going to work!)

Hope you enjoy your day!

Vinca, Loosestrife and Bishop's Weed-Oh My!



Here's the part of the foundation bed that I worked on today. 
It was horribly overgrown and weedy-a real mess. 
It'll be interesting to see what it looks like in a couple of months.

I have been so focused on my garlic mustard and buckthorn invasion that I haven't done anything with the front foundation, which was a big mess. The previous owners had planted variegated vinca along the foundation with some shrubs and perennials. The vinca is everywhere; it's in the lawn, tripping people on the sidewalk, climbing over and through the shrubs, and eating up the other perennials like a kid sucking down candy. That's one side of the bed.

The other side has gooseneck loosestrife which is also busy swallowing its neighbors. In another bed that's just across a gravel path, there's a third garden thug rampaging: bishop's weed. Although I don't have anything against these bullies when sited properly, they just can't get along with others in a mixed bed, so I started digging them out today.

I don't plan on keeping any of the vinca or bishop's weed 'cuz I don't have a good spot for them and they aren't particularly pretty or usefull. However, I do plan to keep one patch of gooseneck loosestrife 'cuz I do like how it looks in bloom and the leaves have pretty color in the fall.

This is what the foundation bed looked like
the summer before we bought the place-not very attractive.

All the plants in this bed are pretty basic: daylilies, heuchera, geranium, columbine, rudbeckia and tickseed. Nothing particularly exciting. It took me all day but I re-edged the bed, fertilized with High Country Garden's Yum Yum Mix, weeded and mulched, and transplanted some of the plants to new locations. (After all that effort, I'll be using a heating pad tonight for sure.)

I've never grown heuchera before and so was shocked to find how straggly these were. Instead of nice neat clumps of leaves, I found long woody stems with new growth sticking several inches out of the ground and not much for roots either. I replanted most of these so that the new growth was ground level. Not sure that's what I was supposed to do; I guess we'll find out. I had to do the same thing with a patch of 'Biokovo' geranium I transplanted. Like the heuchera, it had big woody stems with the new growth at the end of the stem.

Since this particular flower bed hasn't been touched for almost two full years, I figure I'll see what it looks like this summer and then next year-well, I hate waiting so maybe this fall-I'll figure out how to add some pizzazz to it. I'm feeling a bit conflicted, however. I like how the previous owners limited their plant palette and used big swaths of the same plant in large sections of their beds but I also don't want to waste one of the only full sun areas of my whole yard.

Of course, although overall I was happy with the results of today's labor, there were some screw-ups too. I'm pretty sure I killed some columbine plants. I also think I remember seeing some astilbe in this bed last year. I didn't see any today and may have pulled them up when I was getting all apocalyptic on the vinca. I also accidentally broke the shoots off some lilies as I was grappling with some gooseneck loosestrife.



These are where the spore on the yews came from-
weird looking, aren't they?

 Oh, and my yews tricked me today. I was raking out leaves from under them and saw intermittent wisps of thick smoke. What could possibly be burning? I searched the whole bed and didn't smell any smoke smell but I could see it. It took me several minutes to figure it out; the yews were releasing their spores whenever I bumped their branches.

The pollen irritated my nose a bit and left a tinny taste in my mouth. I was a bit concerned; pretty much all parts of a yew are poisonous. Could the spore be too? I told my kids that if I collapsed to tell the 911 folk that I had inhaled a bunch of yew spore. "You what?" they asked. "YEW SPORE" I said slowly and evenly. "You score?" was their reply. "Forget it" I mumbled and went back to my gardening.